SEO Trends Webinar with Rand Fishkin

By Roy Hinkis

SEO Trends Webinar with Rand Fishkin

Thank you to everyone who joined the webinar and submitted their questions to Rand. We hope you enjoyed and we invite you to stay tuned and follow us on Twitter for more webinar announcements: @SimilarWeb. For more SEO predictions for 2016, find out what other experts had to say here. Below, you can find the full length video of the webinar as well as a summary of the top 3 questions Rand answered over the course of the session.

How can competitive intelligence be used for a b2b SEO strategy?

Using a tool such as SimilarWeb can be extremely useful for a competitive intelligence strategy. This can be used to find out what your competitors are doing right, where they are successful, and where they are getting good referral traffic. The referral and ad sections of SimilarWeb can allow you to keep tabs on your competitors and learn from their digital strategy. Rand also emphasized the importance of following up on referrals and finding out if the same referral links that work for your competitors can work for you

What are the best on-page SEO techniques for local business to improve their rank?

For this, Rand used the example of yoga studios in Seattle and told users to be “literal in your title tags.” He also rejected the idea that a site would be penalized in the global rankings if they run a local search. If an American website ran a Canadian campaign, it could help their ranking both locally and in the target area.

How can you deal with the age of the machine learning and Rank Brain in your day to day SEO work?

Rand stressed that now, in the age of Google’s artificial intelligence and machine learning tool, “searcher satisfaction” is more important than ever. Google now learns more about the user and whether or not they found what they were looking for on a particular site. If Google senses that the site is not providing users with a successful journey, they will push the site lower in the rankings. This is something that SEO marketers were less concerned with in the past, but with Google’s machine learning and rank brain, the “user experience” matters.

A pioneer in the field of SEO from a young age, Roy Hinkis currently serves as the Head of SEO & Digital Marketing Evangelist for SimilarWeb. He has over 10 years of experience in online marketing, with specific expertise in affiliate marketing, social media, and of course, SEO.